Biology Blogs

The Scientist, mentioned in a previous post, is a good example of a journal that has both a printed and online version. Some journals give you free complete online access with the subscription to the journal. Some charge an additional fee for supplemental material that isn’t found in the printed journal. The Scientist falls in the latter category.

Emerging Infectious Disease Journal (EID) is an example of a journal that has complete availability online. You can download the entire journal as a pdf file. In contrast to The Scientist, EID is directed at a subgroup of scientist interested in the epidemiology of infectious diseases.

In addition to individual journal sites, there are sites that provide access to multiple journals. Highwire Press is one such site. It provides links to journals that are completely free, some that allow free access to articles that are 12 months old, and some that are pay by article.BioMed Central is an open access online publisher. The Free Medical Journals site maintains a list of free online medical journals. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has many resources available including some free online publications. PLoS ONE is an open-access, online publication site support by Plos Org.

One of the issues with open access publications is copyright. The answer to that problem currently seems to be Creative Commons. This site provides several levels of copyrighting that allow information to be shared without giving up ownership of the creative product.